1. Technical Field
The invention relates to the field of telephony and, more particularly, to the field of telephony signaling interfaces.
2. Description of the Related Art
Telecommunication companies continually create new telephony services and/or features (collectively “services”) to be offered to subscribers. These services include a voice processing component as well as a transaction processing component. Transaction Capability Application Part supports the exchange of transactional information between signaling points within a telephone network, and accordingly, can support a variety of services such as querying a service control point (SCP) in a signaling network to determine a routing number for an 800, 888 or 900 directory number, validating calling and/or credit card information, calling name delivery (CND), and local number portability (LNP).
The development of a new telephony service is a costly and time consuming task. Conventionally, TCAP event processing has been implemented within the same environment, e.g. the telephony switch, as call processing. Because telephony services have been implemented on the telephony switch level, the development of new services often requires specialized personnel having a significant amount of experience in programming the particular telephony switch upon which the service is to be implemented. In addition, the low level manner in which a telephony service is implemented requires developers not only to have knowledge of the telephony switch, but also significant knowledge and understanding of various underlying telecommunications protocols and call processing functions. After development, highly trained personnel again are needed to identify and isolate problems, as well as to ensure that the telephony service functions properly and does not interfere with other telephony services.
The development of telephony services is further complicated by the fact that telephony switches often employ proprietary internal protocols and operating systems. Thus, while a developer may be knowledgeable regarding one particular type of telephony switch, that developer typically cannot implement the same feature on another type of telephony switch with any degree of efficiency. The proprietary nature of telephony switches serves to limit the number of available developers for a given telephony switch, thereby increasing the cost of developing telephony services. Further adding to the cost of telephony service development is that telephony services are not easily ported over from one type of telephony switch to another. In consequence, similar and like features must be redesigned for each telephony switch.